CLUNL

Ronan Pereira, researcher at LiFE group of CLUNL, assina o artigo “Formalidade e pronomes de segunda pessoa do singular no português gaúcho: dados de interpretação / Formality and second person singular pronouns in Gaucho Portuguese: data from interpretation” in the journal Revista de Estudos da Linguagem (UFMG, Brazil).

In this study, the researcher “aimed to bring empirical data regarding how formal the different second person pronouns are interpreted by native speakers, as well as data confirming if they consider “tu” as part of their identity. A word selection task and a 5-point scale formality judgement task were conducted with 233 participants. The results confirm the idea that “tu” is part of the speakers’ identity and they also suggest a triadic system, composed, in order of formality by “tu”, “você”, and “o senhor”, all of them followed by a third person inflectional morphology, whereas“tu” followed by the canonical inflection competes with “você” for the intermediate position. Among the sociolinguistic factors that influence such judgments, only age was relevant, since participants who were 50 years old or older tended to consider sentences with “tu” more informal, regardless of the inflection associated to it” (retrieved from “Abstract”).

The paper is scheduled for publication in September and is already available in the ahead of print section of the journal:
http://www.periodicos.letras.ufmg.br/index.php/relin/article/view/17957